In the final installment of our blog series on our Headshots Experience Day, we look at the technical things that help us make it work, and the financial side of it too. To refresh your memory, please refer to our Headshots Experience Day landing page to see what is included. If you hadn't downloaded my table with a bullet point summary of everything I'm talking about here, feel free to do that.
So many times we see people’s professional portraits with such terrible lighting it is painful (and sad) to see. People may not realize how much lighting impacts their photo, and by extension their business, or even know what good lighting is. Through our many years of experience, we have become masters at evaluating light, quickly. With the ample time we have to set up the lighting in our studio for our HED, we have developed a lighting setup that can look amazing on nearly anyone! We use up to 6 lights for each portrait, each of which plays an important role in making our shots look so good (I will elaborate on this in a separate post). Having a professionally lit photograph can make you and your business look more professional…which, guess what…can lead to more success!
So you may be wondering, how can this be made affordable? Photography at this level is expensive! Bringing in a photographer for one or two new people at the office is often prohibitive. For a point of comparison, a shoot for ONE person, on-location, with everything that is included in our Headshots Experience Day, would be worth about $600! I think if you look at the rates for top photographers in the city, doing on-location headshots of similar quality, it will be around that too. Or, businesses wait until they have 5 or more people to photograph at once, which does bring the cost per person down, but leaves their website sadly out of date for quite a long time.
We wanted to create a solution for Calgary businesses that addressed all the photography related problems above, but was also affordable. And so by bringing everyone to our studio, all on the same day, the overhead per client is much less, and we pass on those savings. What is the overhead you may ask? It takes us 2+ hours, with 3 people, to set up and take down our lighting. If we are shooting on location, we often have to carry out a location scout to see if we can even fit our setup, and so that means two trips for a shoot. There is also hair and makeup, refreshments, and staffing.
The other side of this is the regularity of the event. By making it a monthly shoot, every second Friday, we can help businesses with frequent staff turnover and a need for good marketing to keep their imagery up to date. This helps by making sure that their new people have great photos as soon as possible, so they can go on with their other marketing tasks. And this is only attractive if the price is right – we hope that by bringing everyone to us, we can help our clients improve their marketing efforts by not waiting for 5 or more people to make bringing us in worth it.
And so, not in a nutshell (maybe a large boat?), along with the first two posts (here, and here), this explains why our Headshots Experience Day is the way it is. I hope this is a useful look into what you can expect from your session with us, and why we do it! If you do come in for a photo, please partake of everything on offer, it is there to help! Drink the beer or champagne, have a snack, linger in our lounge, chat with the hair and makeup artists, heck why not even network a little with the people before or after? That would be great!
Thank you for following along, and reading this very long series on our Headshots Experience day. I hope you got something out of it, and we'd love feedback in the comments below about your past experiences with photography, any ideas or thoughts you have on our service, or anything else that might be relevant!
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